Friday, May 16, 2014

Implicit Blacklisting for Cabal

I've been thinking about all the Haskell PVP discussion that's been going on lately. It should be no secret by now that I am a PVP proponent. I'm not here to debate the PVP in this post, so for this discussion let's assume that the PVP is a good thing and should be adopted by all packages published on Hackage. More specifically, let's assume this to mean that every package should specify upper bounds on all dependencies, and that most of the time these bounds will be of the form "< a.b".

Recently there has been discussion about problems encountered when packages that have not been using upper bounds change and start using them. The recent issue with the HTTP package is a good example of this. Roughly speaking the problem is that if foo-1.2 does not provide upper bounds on it's dependency bar, the constraint solver is perpetually "poisoned" because foo-1.2 will always be a candidate even long after bar has become incompatible with foo-1.2. If later foo-3.9 specifies a bound of bar < 0.5, then when bar-0.5 comes out the solver will try to build with foo-1.2 even though it is hopelessly old. This will result in build errors since bar has long since changed its API.

This is a difficult problem. There are several immediately obvious approaches to solving the problem.

Remove the offending old versions (the ones missing upper bounds) from Hackage.

Leave them on Hackage, but mark them as deprecated/blacklisted so they will not be chosen by the solver.

Go back and retroactively add upper bounds to the offending versions.

Start a new empty Hackage server that requires packages to specify upper bounds on all dependencies.

Start a new Hackage mirror that infers upper bounds based on package upload dates.

All of these approaches have problems. The first three are problematic because they mess with build reproducibility. The fourth approach fragments the community and in the very best case would take a lot of time and effort before gaining adoption. The fifth approach has problems because correct upper bounds cannot always be inferred by upload dates.

I would like to propose a solution I call implicit blacklisting. The basic idea is that for each set of versions with the prefix a.b.c Cabal will only consider a single one: the last one. This effectively means that all the lower versions with the prefix a.b.c will be implicitly blacklisted. This approach should also allow maintainers to modify this behavior by specifying more granular version bounds.

In our previous example, suppose there were a number of 0.4 versions of the bar package, with 0.4.3.3 being the last one. In this case, if foo specified a bound of bar < 0.5, the solver would only consider 0.4.3.3. 0.4.3.2 and 0.4.3.1 would not be considered. This would allow us to completely hide a lack of version bounds by making a new patch release that only bumps the d number. If that release had problems, we could address them with more patch releases.

Now imagine that for some crazy reason foo worked with 0.4.3.2, but 0.4.3.3 broke it somehow. Note that if bar is following the PVP, that should not be the case. But there are some well-known cases where the PVP can miss things and there is always the possibility of human error. In this case, foo should specify a bound of bar < 0.4.3.3. In this case, the solver should respect that bound and only consider 0.4.3.2. But 0.4.3.1 would still be ignored as before.

Implicit blacklisting has the advantage that we don't need any special support for explicitly marking versions as deprecated/blacklisted. Another advantage is that it does not cause any problems for people who had locked their code down to using specific versions. If foo specified an exact version of bar == 0.4.3.0, then that will continue to be chosen. Implicit blacklisting also allows us to leave everything in hackage untouched and fix issues incrementally as they arise with the minimum amount of work. In the above issue with HTTP-4000.0.7, we could trivially address it by downloading that version, adding version bounds, and uploading it as HTTP-4000.0.7.1.

All in all, I think this implicit blacklisting idea has a number of desirable properties and very few downsides. It fixes the problem using nothing but our existing infrastructure: version numbers. It doesn’t require us to add new concepts like blacklisted/deprecated flags, out-of-band “revision” markers to denote packages modified after the fact, etc. But since this is a complicated problem I may very well have missed something, so I'd like to hear what the community thinks about this idea.